Ohm (YC S15) is a smarter, lighter car battery that works with your existing car
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
(2) Car batteries do not last only 3-4 years as per the OP. Car batteries can last decades. There are many variables, but the car in my battery is far older than 4 years. (lol)
(3) Replacing an easily-recyclable product with a less-recyclable one is no step forwards.
(4) XX addressed by OP comment, see below XX This thing is a capacitor? What's the voltage potential in there? Any device with internals significantly beyond that may be a serious fire risk in a crash..
(5) Car batteries are not needlessly heavy, nor are they a stock size. Manufacturers do care about performance. If they thought the car could do with lighter battery they would use one. Have some respect for the thought behind stock engineering before replacing it.
(6) Shutting down the voltage supply can be a real pain. A "dead" battery generally still has enough juice to keep electronics ticking over. Cutting it completely is not like turning off a switch. It often means resetting/rebooting stuff once the voltage is restored. For some (BMW) it can even mean a trip to the dealership for a special new battery ritual. http://www.bimmerforums.com/forum/showthread.php?1355106-Why...
You're also right that it's more complicated to recycle lead than lithium batteries, but a recycling process does exist, and it's getting better thanks to the proliferation of lithium batteries in electric cars.
It's actually got 6 capacitors in series (2.7V each). We don't charge them all the way up to 2.7V, so it's normally at about 13V on the terminals. We are super paranoid about safety. The EDLC caps we picked aren't a fire risk, since it's just carbon and a few mL of electrolyte. You're probably thinking of what electrolytic caps do when you reverse bias them, but EDLC caps are much nicer. The worst they'll do is vent the electrolyte, not explode. LiFePO4 batteries are also really stable and are used in electric vehicles all the time.
[1]: http://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2015/07/08/lead-contamination...
Is that actually a lot? Similar statements are made with respect to nuclear waste, but frankly, I've regarded these statements in units of mass as deliberately misleading due to nuclear waste (or lead in this case) to be uniquely dense relative to what we are accustomed to dealing with on a daily basis.
Siri, via Wolfram Alpha, says that 24 million pounds of lead is about 33,900-ft3, or a cube of 32-ft a side. If correct, that doesn't feel like a lot considering this is framed as a the global lead acid car battery recycling waste.
If you took all of that non-recycled car battery lead waste and distributed it evenly across the whole U.S. population, you would have 6 orders of magnitude more than the absorbed dose required to give everyone in the country clinical lead poisoning.
(Obviously most of that waste has no likelihood of being absorbed into someone's body, so this calculation isn't necessarily that meaningful.)
Olympic sized pool = 164ft x 82ft x 9ft 10 inches = 132, 300ft^3. Density of lead: 709 lbs per ft^3.
So a single Olympic-sized pool would weight almost 94,000,000 lbs if filled with lead.
(If you really want to blow your mind, that same pool would weight almost 200 million lbs if filled with Osmium, the most dense element. Of course, that's WAY WAY more than the amount of Osmium that exists...I can't find a world wide figure but US production is only about 250 lbs per year)
The whole dismantler/recycling system in place for automobiles is really something quite impressively successful. Having so many places to pull used parts to keep other cars going lessens environmental burden multiple fold. Battery recycling is probably the biggest triumph of them all though.
Also, vibration testing if you have done any. Custom cars and offroad machines shake. Nobody wants a battery with internals that look like they might break loose.
If you really want to sell a premium battery, create a motorcycle model. Sportbike owners are really into weight reductions and eat through batteries. It might as simple as a smaller plastic shell.
I've also used one to run my Elise (2ZZ 1.8L 4-cylinder) for a few years now without issue.
The three major issues I've heard about are are longevity, price, and reserve capacity. Cold weather is a bit of an issue, but strangely it's actually made better by more load as the battery's internal resistance eventually heats it up to the point that it works fine.
I really don't get this product yet. Unless the supercapacitor provides an incredible enhancement in longevity (maybe it does, but my understanding and experience is that temperature and poor manufacturing are the main enemies to these batteries, not instantaneous load), I'm not sold on buying one instead of one of the inexpensive existing alternatives.
The supercaps provide a huge enhancement in longevity, since the maximum current draw from the battery is lower. This can even mean a difference in manufacturing for the battery in some cases, as there are design tradeoffs between peak current draw and lifetime.
It's also potentially lower weight and lower cost, since you won't need as large of a battery (EDLCs aren't cheap though, so there is a limit).
LiFePO is much less likely to enter thermal runaway, and much less explosive when it does. Overcharging them is about as bad as non lithium chemistries (it's even possible to start a fire by overcharging a lead-acid). Don't try this at home, but overcharging and shorting a LiFePO isn't nearly as catastrophic as doing so with a LiCoO or LiPo. With those chemistries you're basically relying on the battery firmware to keep the battery from exploding under those conditions.
The price point is impressive if you can sell at only ~$50 more than a standard lead-acid battery. If pressed to find a flaw, I think the biggest is one you've already identified:
There’s one: you can’t run your lights and/or stereo as
long with your engine turned off. Ohm’s battery reserve
comes in at 10 amp hours; most lead-acid car batteries
come in at about 45 amp hours. If you can run your
stereo with your engine off for three hours on your
current battery, you’d be able to run it on Ohm for less
than an hour.
So I'd reconsider the size of the LiFePO4 battery, even if it makes the product cost a bit more. You need those high-end buyers. You're not going to sell these to Joe Sixpack for installation in his '98 F-150 pickup.
And yes, your marketing materials are grossly exaggerating both the environmental problems with lead-acid batteries and their typical service life. There is clearly a global regulatory jihad against lead in all of its forms and uses, though, so you do have that going for you.
Edit: Don't forget that auto stop/start is growing in popularity as well. I think it's actually mandatory in some (European?) markets. OEMs are moving toward "smarter" (read: DRM-locked) batteries to handle these additional requirements. I wonder if a better business model might be to offer recycling/rebuilding services that swap out lead plates for LiFePO4/supercap hardware in existing batteries?
Really? I've left the satellite radio playing for hours in my 2011 Hyundai Sonata at moderate volume with no hint of problem starting my car afterwards. It has the premium sound system (including subwoofer) and navigation.
Usually what happens in my case is I forget to turn the headlights from 'Auto' to 'Off.' But even with the lights and fans off I don't tend to see more than 20-30 minutes of operation at most. The car's version of HAL 9000 tries to be conservative and shut things down as soon as the battery voltage goes below about 11.9.
The headlights can be easily 150watt. I doubt the radio uses more than 15.
If there were led headlights (or fluorescent for that matter) you should expect the draw to be about 1/5 that number.
That number includes marker and tail lights and those can be LED, so the number would be lower in that case.
Look, take it up with Volkswagen AG. They're the ones who designed the electrical system in the car in question. Don't shoot the messenger, but a long term business plan centered around aftermarket car batteries is going to be a challenging play, for these and other reasons.
Probably your battery is near dead.
Also F150 pickup trucks are about $60K when loaded with options. Those guys are free spenders compared to commuter car drivers.
If you buy new. The parent commenter specifically mentioned a '98 F150.
Personally, though, I'm interested in one of these for my Blazer for the cold-temperature performance alone. If the lower power capacity is an issue, I could always just carry around my jumpbox.
The accessory draw is enough to lower the (indicated) terminal voltage from about 12.6 volts to about 12.0 in 15-30 minutes, depending on what accessories are actually turned on.
Your battery is broken or you have a near-short somewhere. I sit in my cheap-ass Jeep for 45 minutes a week listening to the radio for 5 times a week and have for years. Replace it, if it doesn't work seek professional repair.
So if you think this is a sustainable, scalable state of affairs, at a time when automotive tech is undergoing its greatest disruption since the horse, we'll leave the discussion at that. I'll just say that I think this is a really bad time to aim their business plan at a fixed target, and one that I'm not sure they actually understand.
I'm not sure how I feel about it, personally. I share a lot of the concerns that have been raised here (battery cutout wiping my clock+radio, vibration, longevity, cranking+jumping ability, etc), and I'm always a bit wary of "One Weird Trick; Auto Companies Hate Him!" claims. I'm certainly not going to be the test dummy for that one, I got places to be that aren't the side of the road. Give me 5 years of early adopters and we'll see.
Neither here nor there, but I was one of the early adopters of electric motors in R/C airplanes. I was doing it since before brushless was a thing (about 15 years), my first plane used a brushed Graupner car motor and Sub-C car packs (boy howdy was that underpowered). I can tell you that batteries have a very finite lifetime, especially when you abuse them under high-current loads. I worry that a lot of hybrid/electric owners are in for some sticker shock when their packs wear out. That one unit is a pretty significant fraction of the total cost and it's a wear item. I know there's steps taken to lengthen the life of the pack, but you can't run them indefinitely.
You gain:
* Auto-shutoff when your battery gets too low.
* Possibly some increased lifespan
* ~34lbs in weight reduction, which might deliver a small performance increase.
You lose:
* 78% of your battery capacity
* $20-$150 on the purchase price of the battery
Personally, I don't like the idea of paying more money for less battery capacity. If, however, Ohm came with a rock-solid 7-year replacement warranty, I might be able to get over that.
There's also the problem that they apparently offer only a single size/form factor (which is roughly equivalent to 34, 34/78, 75/25, or 35), and that for many applications this device does not offer enough starting power. Never mind reserve capacity. But even if this size is appropriate to your car, there are other reasons to be skeptical.
Are you sitting in parking lots listening music these days? That did sound cool when you were kid, but majority will never do that (or take their car camping).
That's a good idea, and they could even make it a lifetime warranty (lifetime of the car, that is). "Ohm: The last battery your car will ever need" could make a nice tagline.
In the fine print, the implementation would be a replacement guarantee for as long as the customer owns their car. Since most people don't keep the same car for 7 years, it would be a safer bet than a fixed 7-year guarantee.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...
On the other hand, if there's that much more space, I'm curious as to why some more battery or capacitor banks couldn't be added to address the low-capacity concerns.
I'd pay almost as much for that.
I compulsively check to make sure my lights are turned off yet my battery still dies at least once a year because I don't regularly use my car, costing around $200 in on-site service and replacement per go. The smart shut-off feature is worth it to me - even if it's just to save time waiting around for someone to perform a replacement. The reduction in weight is a bonus as I have a small car with a fairly humble engine displacement.
This has saved me many, many hundreds of dollars, being late for work, etc.
I also have a battery maintainer that keeps a battery sitting around charged up.
The last thing is a battery shut-off switch that sits on the battery terminal. If you're going to leave the car a while, shut it off. It prevents the trickle going to keep the radio alive from killing the battery (which takes a week or two).
But I don't think your average mass-market consumer is going to care much about 30lbs, or notice a difference in performance or handling if they did.
In reality, if you looked through the car of a random sample of the population, you'd probably find about 30lbs of crap in their car that they could remove (sporting equipment, rubbish, bags, etc).
Absolutely the average buyer of a Camry is not going to care about this. But that wasn't at all my point. Some cars (more often in Europe/Japan where driving is more fun because they have corners), take weight seriously. I think car manufacturers might take this option seriously in their sport divisions.
Probably because of the "in the real world they're called 'grams'" remark. I vastly prefer metric over Imperial, too, but that came across as a tad snobbish, eh?
I upvoted, though, for what it's worth; weight savings aren't just the purview of racecars.
As for (5), they clearly care about cost.
What are you objecting to?
The BMW thing is interesting. The reason they do that little "ritual" is because they want to program the ECU to use a particular charging profile for your battery, and it needs to know the age of the battery and the type (AGM or not). That's to try to extend the lifetime of the battery. We don't really need to worry about that, since we handle all the charging profiles internally. One of our testers drives a BMW, so we're making sure that we can handle that and similar cases.
You can buy lighter-weight, lower-capacity batteries to use in competitions where weight matters, or higher-technology batteries for use in angles where lead-acid will give up the ghost. Batteries are frequently moved by tuners to places where their weight has less of an affect on the car's suspension.
I have a 2003 VW GTi. Had the battery replaced for the first time late last year. The AAA Tech was surprised that I had over 10 years of use with the stock battery.
Still, this product does seem interesting.
Really? That would kill any interest I'd have in a BMW. Heck, whenever I work on my car, the first thing I do is disconnect the battery.
Of course, that's why I'm an engineer :-)
Case-in-point: Woolfe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10047721
I can also see how one would implement a low voltage cutoff to prevent running down the battery, but then, how in the world do you automatically re-engage the battery to allow starting the car? You've shut off the power to the whole car, so you no longer have a circuit to monitor. If you're allowing some amount of current to trickle out, you must, by definition, be allowing the voltage to sag, which can run the ECU or alarm out of spec, causing havoc.
As the battery designer, your only input to make these decisions is the resistance of the car's electrical system.
The only thing you control is your own internal resistance.
The capacity quoted on lead-acid is also a bit deceptive. There amount of current you can draw drops pretty heavily with state-of-charge. You might have trouble starting your car even with 50% of charge left. So if Ohm doesn't work for you, you'd likely be having trouble with a lead-acid as well.
As far as the low-voltage cutout - it's definitely not trivial, but it's been done in other applications previously. I'd be a bit ashamed if you were able to come up with a solution of the cuff though, it took us a lot of work to get it working! It does involve some energy injection, but not enough to cause problems.
You can periodically pulse the circuit at a low voltage and figure out the resistance, and if the voltage is low enough, you won't power anything up. When the ignition goes into the ON position, you've got a huge drop in resistance as fuel pump, and other necessary electronics get enabled. A sudden drop in resistance is a good signal that you should turn the power back on. This will not work with some more recent electronic systems, but should work great for most mechanical ones. Pretty sure you haven't solved things like the interaction with a BMW battery monitoring computer, for example, and those cars will probably reject your battery with some crazy error after a while.
It's good that you've got space for more reserve capacity, parasitic drag is getting higher as cars get more fancy. For example, radiator fans and turbo oil circulators can run for quite a while after the engine is off.
Your super capacitor design is elegant - you can charge the supercap off the battery slowly, even at low state of charge where its voltage would sag too low for the starter relay if you were directly using the battery.
I have a little car which I race and weight matters, so I've been using a ~12Ah LiFePO4 home-made battery for a while (A123 cells). This is a very durable little battery chemistry. No fancy super-caps, though, I just keep mine topped off and starting the car puts the battery cells close to their maximum discharge current.
I wish you guys the best of luck. Lead acids are pointless with modern battery technology.
...and more on that point, I drive an RX-7 and my engine puts out _extreme_ amounts of heat under the hood. a 50C top-end probably isn't enough for driving on hot days.
I would go for one of these without a second thought because a) though my car is light, reducing more weight helps out loads with performance and b) these things are known to kill alternators and I'd love advance warning of when I might end up stranded without having to test the battery's volts every day.
I'd love to demo one of these.
Still would want a lighter battery though.
This picture shows a 10x decrease in life when the temp varies from 25C to 65C: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EDLC-Life_time_curves.png
[ 1 ] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercapacitor
EDIT: I'm not trying to inject bad feelings here or contradict Ohm. I'm just clarifying the effect of temperature on supercap life. There is some effect on cap lifetime at high temps. I hope the product succeeds. I know sailors have using lithium batteries for a while now, but as mentioned elsewhere, they are shockingly expensive (like $6k).
I live in Cambridge, MA (so we get winters) and I can't remember the last time I've had a regularly driven car's battery fail in under 7 years.
Yup. I bought a Battery Tender[1] for my infrequently-used vehicles and now the batteries last indefinitely[2]
[1] http://amzn.com/B000CITK8S
[2] :) Based on the fact that I haven't had to replace them yet after 5 years.
(1) Perhaps the design flaw is in the children.
The problem is I don't understand how the battery would shut down just lights and accessories without a) losing all your radio presets b) requiring entering the anti-theft code in the radio (risky because if you get it wrong you can brick your radio) c) still have power to know that you're trying to start the car.
It seems to me this requires more than internal battery smarts but changes to the car's wiring to have separate battery connections for computer, accessory, and starter.
Right now most cars have just one big post clamp for the + and - battery connections.
I'd be worried about the impact of rapidly increasing electrification (including hybrids) on the high end market (the most likely consumers for this), but it's such a huge market at present that it probably doesn't matter.
Kudos, guys.
How does that work? If the battery stops providing current to prevent itself from being fully drained, you're not going to have power to the car's computers to actually start anything.
It will know when the internal batteries are running low (the internal charge/discharge monitor IC doing battery "gas gauge" measuring). It'll maintain a reserve of a few crank's worth of energy, and trigger shutdown before that's exhausted.
It can also tell if the engine is running, because the alternator will be, and charging it. It can also monitor the active discharge current.
If the battery is low and there's a small but fairly constant discharge, it's probably lights/radio, and a timeout of an hour might be reasonable.
It could then either cut power completely, or regulate discharge current to a couple of milliamps or something, just enough to sense teh spike when the starter motor is switched in. At that point, it switches in the supercap or goes back to full power 12v mode, and the starter gets cranked.
The only downside I can see is that fully isolating the battery may have side effects that upset the ECU, radio or immobiliser system (I recall our radio would go into 'presumed stolen' mode if fully disconnected and require a PIN to work properly, I have no idea if/how that happens in modern cars though)
A "dead" lead-acid battery often isn't dead enough for that to happen, just htat it can't supply the ~200A that the starter requires to crank.
How much safety testing have you done on your battery? Specifically, if an Ohm battery is involved in a collision, how will it fare? I know you are not content with shipping anything you aren't comfortable with your own family members driving with [1]. But, how do you know this? What makes you so sure? I don't mean to come across as interrogative - I am just curious.
edit: grammar
I have no idea if this ends up being a significant number, but I think the average driver spends somewhere around $10k in fuel over the expected lifetime of this battery; if cutting down the weight by 1-2% reduces fuel consumption by a comparable amount then Ohm would pay for itself.
I was going to say, for the first iteration of the product you could consider using classic lead-acid instead of LiPo. It's cheap, so it would help keep you price-competitive. It's absolutely proven as an automotive battery chemistry.
The difference vs. a classic battery would be, your smart circuitry to shut off the battery, and the cap stage would allow for a tiny battery even on big engines. Your LiPo model already sacrifices capacity, and the only other reason for a big battery is CCA, which the caps solve. Thus you could put an itty-bitty 10Ah lead-acid in an F-550. Bigger & heavier than a 10Ah LiPo? Sure, but still way smaller and lighter than modern F-550 batteries.
You could then move to LiPo for later versions as you get the truly novel parts of the product dialed in and costs starts to come down.
I'm trying to understand what the barriers are.
Industrial motors aren't something I've looked into a lot yet, but it could be interesting. I was just talking with someone the other day about using supercaps in robotics applications. Apparently some people are already putting small supercaps in the joints near the motors to help provide surge current during high accelerations or loads.
I have an older car with occasional electrical gremlins. My battery is fine, but an ounce of prevention...
http://www.cnet.com/news/pocket-sized-jump-starters/
(linking the review because I don't know which brands are reasonable...)
Stricter regulations on shipping methods than for other cell chemistries. Degrades at high temperatures.
However, for Lithium Iron Phosphate LiFePO4: "Lithium phosphate cells are incombustible in the event of mishandling during charge or discharge, they are more stable under overcharge or short circuit conditions and they can withstand high temperatures without decomposing."
We believe so, but don't want to say it until we can verify for sure. Our temp chamber unfortunately has trouble pushing anything south of -20F and it's a bit hard to find weather that cold in August.
There's a few other vids on this topic if you search through the channel
-22F ~ -30C
They are always looking to shave off weight so it can be redistributed in the way they want. Being able to cut 30lbs would be a big deal.
The full lithium batteries are too expensive, and or don't provide enough starting amps.
I've got a 2006 Forester with a manual. I'll occasionally stall it backing out of a parking spot, so I'll have to start it again. For some reason it's much more difficult to start in between cold and warmed up, so it'll take several seconds of cranking to fire back up. If I were to stall it again trying to get going, would I then be in trouble?
It doesn't happen often, perhaps only once a month. But if I'm stuck there for 30 seconds while the LiFe batteries recharge the supercap I'm not going to be happy.
I'm spoiled from having driven a number of very powerful manuals. Big engines mean a lot of rotating mass which means that no revving is needed, just pop the clutch and go. That extra rotating mass also means that the ECU has more time to notice the drop in RPM and give it a little extra gas to bring idle back up.
Not so in the Subaru. It's a very light engine and seemingly a pretty light flywheel too.
IIRC the Subaru flywheels for the Impreza weigh in at about 20 lbs - and this is likely similar or identical to what is used in the Foresters.
When the clutch engagement time is say 1 second and your engine is idling at 900 rpm you're only doing 1.5 rev/sec. In a four stroke, four cylinder engine that means you're getting on average 1.5 combustion events per second. In the 1 second engagement, you get 1 or 2 combustion events. In the 8 cylinder you get at least 2 and probably 3.
I thought about doing the math for how much energy is in a cylinder firing versus stored in the rotational inertia of the moving parts, but honestly I don't know that I really care. I know anecdotally that big engines make it easier to get cars moving for some reason, and that smaller engines make it a little more difficult. I just speculated as to why I thought that might be.
With that said, check out where the engagement of your clutch is. I've had people complain about grabby clutches(stalling) only to find out the engagement point is almost at the top of the throw (Former Subaru tech)
TL;DR: The car wakes up with amnesia and has to discover for itself that it's old.
The innovation here seems to be the capacitor bank, which lets you get away with a much smaller and cheaper lithium ion pack.
We really approached the problem from the opposite direction. We started with supercapacitors and asked ourselves how we could make a reliable system around them. Huge current surges at the levels needed for starting a car are hugely destructive for batteries. It's almost as bad as just shorting them with a wrench. We decided that capacitors were fundamentally better suited for what a car battery does.
Sorry, it isn't my intention to be less than cordial. I just don't see a problem screaming for a fix. Nobody I know is screaming about the batteries in their cars. I don't even know (or care) what batteries are in our vehicles and I am far more aware of automotive matter than the average person out there.
Longevity isn't an issue.
Weight? People are far more interested in losing 34 lbs of fat from their bodies than 34 lbs of battery from their cars. The former would make them very happy while the latter is completely off their radar.
"It costs more but it's better" (paraphrasing). The world is littered with the carcasses of businesses who thought "better" was equivalent to "sales". I've done that before and lived to learn a few expensive lessons. This might very well be better in objective terms from a certain point of view but people are not going to hand over another $50 for something they truly don't care about. This isn't an iPhone or a Nest type product where "luxury makes me feel good" is part of the mental process.
I do agree the racing community might have interest in something like this. That said, if I were building a race car I would use Lithium Polymer battery packs that deliver tremendous power at a lower volume and weight. Are there rules prohibiting this due to fire hazard issues?
And yet, I could be absolutely wrong in my view.
This seems to be the trend, see racing tech (Formula 1, WEC, etc.). We will probably see this in all new consumer cars sometime soon.
Once every car has a battery, wouldn't the standard car battery that's most common today be obsolete?
At your price point, performance/luxury cars seem to be your only market, which are also the cars that will electric drive before mid to low end cars. These are also the owners who will replace their cars every 3-5 years anyway. Either from a 3 year lease or the 4 year warranty is out and they want something new.
I don't mean to be discouraging but, it seems your market viability, if there is any to begin with, is already limited to 5 years at the most.
I do love the idea of saving 30 lbs weight, it's negligible for most of my driving in my sports coupe, but I like to feel like it's making a difference!
I think in some states it's required by law, and although this is probably an artifact of history (you must be able to run your hazards even if you're out of petrol etc) it still means that cars will all have such batteries for the foreseeable future.
I would seriously doubt the market viability being five years. Car manufactures like homogeneous models where possible - so you'd expect to see batteries until every model in the range was a hybrid. It's otherwise additional complexity, and I'd imagine a right pain to get restarted when flat.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Optima-Batteries-8171-767-DS46B24R-Yel...
It is possible, though, that a supercapacitor bank could be useful in the frontend to serve much like this battery does. I could see it being potentially useful to have the supercapacitor get the motors turning to provide torque as fast as possible, with the regular batteries providing the lower current to keep things going.
I'm not sure even that will be a market they can cater to as newer performance/luxury cars have a massive amount of electronics and computers inside that put a heavy continuous drain on the battery (and continue to drain even when the car isn't running).
Considering this new battery can't even hold the amount of power that a normal car battery can, I don't see it being used in high-draw luxury vehicles.
That day is still a long way away, and once it arrives, there will still be large numbers of classic and modern hot rods on the road. That's not a small market.
> At your price point, performance/luxury cars seem to be your only market
The US automotive aftermarket was around $300 billion in 2013.
> ...already limited to 5 years at the most.
I seriously doubt that even the majority of vehicles on the road will be EVs within 5 years. And 5 years is plenty of time to develop other innovative automotive products.
Is this really true? It sounded from the article like they're only about $50 more than a typical battery, unless I missed something. I could see some people with normal cars shelling out $50 for the longer life and features to avoid a dead battery, even if the reduced weight doesn't matter much to them.
my current BMW battery cost $130 and rated for something like 6 years - the car is 14.5 years old, had batteries replaced at 6.5 and 12.5 years (both times it wasn't dead yet, just on suggestion by the shop).
Most people will take their car to a repair shop when they have problems with their battery and will take whatever battery the tech/shop suggests (as long as its in their price range).
Unless this company starts pitching their batteries really well to these repair shops, they're not going to see much business.
My truck battery pumps out 750CA for short bursts. That's about 12 horsepower. Lithium batteries can only accomplish that in large parallel banks.
Back when I drove a fast sporty little car, I got one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0002ILK6I
$100, 4 pounds. Proven technology. I can buy it today.
Half the cost, 60% more capacity, and 2/3 the weight of this "Ohm". Smaller too, from the looks of the "Ohm".
I'm not trying to rag on you guys, but I can't figure out why I would pick the "Ohm", unless maybe it's got a really rippin' CCA.
Edit: Amazon is incorrect, ODYSSEY quotes the battery as 15.4lbs:
http://shop.odysseybattery.com/p/pc680-p
To compare like for like, we would look here:
http://shop.odysseybattery.com/p/pc310-p?pp=12
8Ah, 5.9lbs, tiny, $163 on Amazon. I hope you can beat it on CCA.
Just trying to share some of the challenges you face.
Like so much else out there, they want you to think it's better when in reality it's at best a niche offering that's going to be worse for most people. But there are a lot of people out there who are happy to spend 2x or 5x or even 10x on something that a "fellow startup" is making, just because it's novel or made by another small company, regardless of its actual merit. As they've said forever, a fool and his money are soon parted.
Such small capacity would work only for perfectly starting engine. Any issues and you're out of capacity. Cranking an engine requires hundreds of Amperes, like 500-800A. Thus each 10s of cranking burns 1.5-2.5Ah.
The CCA rating of a car battery is the current the cold battery can produce during 30s. 10Ah LiPo at 30C would mean maximum 300 CCA - i don't think it would satisfy any official reqs for any passenger car around. The super capacitor produces higher current, yet for much shorter bursts. Thus again only easy starting engines on smaller cars.
The high capacity of most lead-acid is really just a side-effect of making a battery that can deliver high current over a reasonable lifetime.
Also car user.
The battery in my Fiat is the one that was in it when I got it in 2006.
2. do not drive for a month
3. car's slow but steady draw drains battery to where it self shuts off
4. attempt to enter car
5. realize that it is a modern car, and without electricity from the battery you cannot even open the door
6. ...
7. profit?
As far as testing, we've been driving on it ourselves for 5 months now. We have a cycle and temperature testing setup in our shop. We will do all of the testing we need to before we ship to anyone. Our earliest customers are likely to be the people in the world closest to us. We won't give you anything we wouldn't feel comfortable with them using.
EV Power is just one of several companies that have been making them for years.
I'm curious to see if you expect to get 7 years life on a LiFePO4 in hot states. I just measured the battery temp (at the terminal) on my truck, it was 163 ºF. Road surface temp is 155 ºF.
This is quite common, everyday summer stuff here in Texas.
It seems very unlikely that you can hold a LiFePO4 at 100% state of charge in a temperature environment like this and still get anywhere near 7 years of life.
Are you doing something like using a 20 A-H battery, charged to 70% SOC or something, to deal with high-heat/high SOC degradation?
Apart from the environmentals (see sandworm101), are debatable and the main tradeoffs is weight vs capacity.
Sports car enthusiasts seems like the most likely market. Some of these guys will drill holes into foot pedals to save grams. You'd need to look at what's available to them to see if this would sell. Comparing to average lead batteries is not much use.
Anyway, this probably isn't the long game.
Have these guys tried to start atmospheric diesel at -20 C? That capacity is absurdly low. I roll my 80 hp diesel with 7 times the capacity.
I see no benefit at all - you take something reliable as hell, make it unrealiable by adding hardware and software, reduce the capacity, just to shave 20 pounds of weight of a 3000 pound car.
If it was normal sized battery with some smarts - it could have been useful. But the current incarnation is - works only in the very moderate climates with mild winters.
() explaining the plural "batteries", above.
I think someone already sells a device to work like that for commercial tractors, and I was wondering when someone more interested in starting a company than I am would realize you could have a tiny battery plus EDLCs for a car.
I could replace the engine's starter battery with this one for a bit of weight savings ... and it's protected from the "house" circuits" by a charging diode, so there's no risk of discharge.
Please be careful to not make it too 'smart'. I don't think a car battery needs to be connected to the internet of things that can be remotely hacked into :-).
There aren't many of us who run winches, but thems of us that do want quite a few (650 CCA is not uncommon, and some winch manufacturers recommend deep cycle batteries like the Yellowtop Optima).
A quick search shows that some lighter duty winches will draw 60-90A, while heavier duty winches can easily draw ~250A to ~350A.
The winch I'll be installing next month as a 10,000lb pull rating. That requires a lot of power.... (Why 5T? Because my Jeep weighs a hair over 2.25T, and if it's stuck in the mud, I'll need to overcome the mud....)
A winch is typically connected directly to the battery and is controlled via a relay: The control cable uses very low current to activate/deactivate a solenoid that switches the winch on/off.
(It's an interesting and ironic bit of jargon: When winch owners refer to a winch's solenoids, they are referring to the control relays... ...but any winch contains at least three solenoids, one low-draw solenoid in the relay, and two high-draw solenoids in the winch itself, that is, the electromagnets that are the heart of the motor....)
Nonsense; lead acid batteries easily last 5 years or more.
Since the article lowballs the life of a lead-acid battery, it's reasonable to suspect that it's likewise overestimating the seven year life of this new battery, which would make them about equal.
> They’re filled with garbage materials that are terrible for the planet.
More FUD. The garbage materials are sealed, and batteries get recycled. Places that sell you the new one take back the old one, generally.
Battery places are not going to know what to do with this new-fangled thing.
So it's down to the 6 pounds and gas mileage. Okay, realistically, let's talk about the environment now: this is for an internal-combustion-engine car that spews several tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere. If you want to save the planet, ride a bicycle. Still, this could make in excess of a one percent difference in fuel economy, which is significant, and will easily more than pay for the battery. Say you spend 200 bucks on fuel per month. Get 3 of those back thanks to the 6 pound battery, that's 36 over 12 months. If it holds up for 10 years, 360 saved.
Easier on the lower back is a plus. For many people, this is a do not care; only the DIY battery swappers who do it in the parking lot will be somewhat relieved, as well as the people who swap batteries as part of their work duties.
Poor capacity is a minus. People don't just run the stereo while parked; sometimes they have the headlights on or use other accessories, not always ones built-into the car. On a warm day you might listen to the stereo, and have a fan circulating the air. How about emergencies? If you're stranded somewhere with a dead engine, it's better to have more battery capacity than less for whatever. Flashing your lights at another car, say.
> They die without warning
That is not entirely true: there are in fact warning signs which, combined with age (being say > 5 years) add up to "change the battery". A lead-acid batter that has given you five warnings will then die without an additional warning, if five warnings is all which that battery has been blessed with. Those who don't recognize the warnings of course curse the battery for dying without a warning.
Who is to say this battery won't exhibit sudden failure modes? Suppose the business takes off and millions of these that are actually sold to consumers are made in sweatshops overseas, with all kinds of corners cut to save costs. Will those units still hold up? Let's compare prototype to prototype, shipping product on the shelves with shipping product on the shelves.
Not just generally, pretty much universally. You can't buy a starter battery without paying a core charge any more; according to the EPA (http://www.epa.gov/osw/conserve/materials/battery.htm), 99% of all lead-acid batteries are recycled. Not even steel cans (http://www.kab.org/site/PageServer?pagename=recycling_facts_...), the most recycled container type, come close.
You would not be far wrong in claiming that the lead-acid battery is the world's most environmentally friendly manufactured product. I don't blame Ohm directly for TC's hyperbole; TC is a known rag. But still... have the decency to stand up for the facts.
Give me a break. With 10 amp hours my car will probably not be able to make through a single engine start.
Hope you don't plan on selling in the US because this behavior is going to get you sued into oblivion by the family of whoever ends up dead because the lights turned off abruptly on a vehicle with a faulty charging system.
"I do see a potential problem with lights turning off abruptly, for example if an accident occurs as a result it could open up the company to a lawsuit, even if it is the result of a faulty charging system."
I personally wouldn't agree (do normal battery makers get sued whenever a battery dies?) but it would no longer be gratuitously negative.